alt Hacker NewsThe amount of self owning that is happening to AI companies is crazy.
I don't understand why their marketing department/execs can't see the conflict between claiming AI is going to take all jobs, that the model is super dangerous and AI hate among the general public, increased governmental oversight.
Anthropic is guilty of the latter but the former applies to most of these AI companies.
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To me they are genuinely trying to walk a tough line - they legitimately believe that they need to warn the public and make a lot of noise so society can try to adapt to this technology. OTOH no adaption (good or bad) can take place if the models themselves are so restricted as to be inaccessible, or if the powers that be don't understand it well enough to put the right policy/laws in place.
As far as I can tell, much of Anthropic genuinely believes that someone will build an AI in the next 3-20 years that's significantly smarter than any human alive. Sounds wild, but a lot of their people have been saying this since 2018 or even earlier. I think they're true believers. Furthermore, they believe that building such an AI would be dangerous.
So their plan is:
1. We can't stop other people from building something dangerous.
2. But we can get there first.
3. If we build it, it has maybe a 15% chance of killing everyone alive. (I think that's a number I've seen Dario use before, but I may be wrong.) If OpenAI or China build it, the odds would be worse.
Obviously, if Anthropic is actually correct about (1) and (3), then nobody should allowed to build frontier AI.
People find it really hard to believe that (a) anyone believes in the possibility of dangerous AI in our lifetimes, and (b) that someone could believe what Anthropic seems to believe and then still go ahead and gamble with everyone's lives anyway.